Saturday, June 11, 2011

QR Code Generator

Last weekend, I've created this simple QR-Code Generator. It was small just-for-fun project. It's not that I felt the world'd need another QR Code Generator. I was looking for a simple project to play a with Googles Closure Library and Closure Compiler, especially its option for Advanced Optimization. It enables function inlining and dead code removal, which I think is a really cool feature for javascript libraries, as you hardly every use all the features such libraries provide. This means you javascript files will get unnecessarily big, even if you do use some code minifier like Yahoo YUI or Closure Compiler (without Advanced Optimization).

In my case I get the following javascript file sizes:

simple optimization: 251K (gzipped: 57K)

advanced optimization: 60K (gzipped: 22K)

As far as I know jQuery unfortunately is not compatible with Advanced Optimization, though its documentation is mutch better.

The QR-Code Generator itself offers functionality for encoding Text, URLs, phone numbers and SMS. It has an option for shortening URLs. Wherefore it makes use of the goo.gl URL Shortener API. QR-Code-Images are generated using Google Chart API.

I've published a it as a WebApp on Chrome Web Store. That's also something I wanted to try out. Maybe even some people consider it useful.